Reading Proust in Berkeley

11/28/2011

In our last meeting, I mentioned the phrase “Kale Factor”, which has been rolling around my head for the past few months, and if you will indulge me, I’d like to take this opportunity to figure out what I really mean by it, and why it seems so important to me now, when we are reading Proust.

I love kale. I look forward to eating it. I grow it in my yard, and I look for opportunities to include it in recipes. When we lived in Brussels, I missed not being able to find it in the grocery store. It naturally springs to mind as a beautiful dark green compliment to salmon, as a toothy leaf to swirl into soups, and as delightful when oiled and salted and roasted into chips.

What if it turned out that kale wasn’t a super-food? What if it was just an average vegetable, like turnips or celery, neither toxic nor not particularly healthy? How would I feel about it? How much does the pleasure I associate with kale consumption rely upon factors extrinsic to it’s actual gustatory qualities?

Plenty of marketing research has demonstrated that our enjoyment of food is highly influenced by our associations to it. (See Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink) Put the soda in the wrong can, and we won’t like it as much. Proust showed us how the experience of cookie crumbs soaking into tea can evoke a rich set of meanings and memories that can be just as salient as the mouth feel of the original stimulus. So it is to be expected that some degree of my pleasure in kale lies in its ‘Kale Factor’ (KF), its ability to activate within me a righteous sense cruciferous cancer-fighting wholesomeness (and here in Berkeley it can get extra points if it is locally and organically grown).

A high KF, by itself, is probably not enough to sustain our enduring interest, if the intrinsic experience is not at least interesting. Coffee, chocolate, wine, even Proust, have clearly prospered largely on their own merits, not just because they were deemed virtuous (carob or acai anyone?) And of course not everyone is positively influenced by the Kale Factor (probably why you don’t see hoards of teenagers descending on the produce aisle). However, a high KF is often a critical motivational factor to nudge me towards something I might otherwise drift away from, at least until the point that my involvement becomes stabilized by other factors such as its intrinsic qualities or my own habit.

KF helps me negotiate the challenges of non-immediate gratifications. Honestly, for me, reading Proust is hard, often soporific. Sometimes getting into it feels like trying to get a 747 off the ground, and continuing to read is like keeping the 747 in the air. But as Renée described at our last meeting, after some time of effort-fully muddling through, something starts to happen. Images unfold in my mind, his little observations make me smile, and then I am in it for its own sake, with a happy chorus of Kale singing in the background (“like a song taken up in ‘head voice’, an octave above”. (MK translation, pg. 69)

11/29/2011

Near the end of the "Combray" chapter, Proust's Narrator discusses how, as a boy, he used to wander the Méséglise Way in a fruitless search for the young freckle-faced girl he once encountered there.

"It seemed to me," he writes, "that the beauty of the trees was hers also, and that her kisses would reveal to me the spirit of those horizons" (SW, 220).

Somehow, as he wanders, he finds that his appreciation for everything around him is enhanced by his thoughts of Gilberte. He explains:

"...my imagination, drawing strength from the contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the realms of my imagination, my desire no longer had any bounds...

"For at that time everything that was not myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear to full-grown men. And between the earth and its creatures I made no distinction...

"I could believe this all the more readily (and also that the caresses by which she would bring that savour to my senses would themselves be of a special kind, yielding a pleasure which I could never derive from anyone else) since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of my life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not yet reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same" (SW, 220-222).

So let's get this straight. According to Proust:

The young lover "...has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it..."

Whereas, the older lover (would this be all the rest of us?) has reduced sensual pleasure "...to a general idea which makes one regard [one's lovers] thenceforward as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same."

That caught my attention. It struck me as quite cynical.

But he doesn't leave it there. Proust expands further on the experience of the young lover:

"Indeed, that pleasure does not even exist, isolated, distinct, formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate aim for which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the preliminary perturbation that one feels. Scarcely does one think of it as a pleasure in store for one; rather does one call it her charm; for one does not think of oneself, but only of escaping from oneself..." (SW, 222)

I found this fascinating. And I had to ask myself...

Is it true that my earliest experiences of sensual pleasure were qualitatively different from all of my experiences of pleasure in the years that followed? Did they have more specificity to them, more immediacy? When we were younger did we manage to escape from ourselves in a way that is closed to us now?

My answer, upon reflection? Yes. I believe that Proust is right.

Certainly it remains this woman or this man, in this moment, for whom a person's heart pounds, at any age. How could it be otherwise? But Proust has convinced me that along with the pleasures we experience in the moment, there is another, faint strain for most of us now: the knowledge of... where it all might lead.

This knowledge is both bluntly physical and briskly practical. You know something of your body's urges and how they may be experienced. You also know something of the pleasures of companionship, of relying on another person and providing for another person, in a relationship. You have enjoyed both in the past; you would like to experience them again, or, as the case may be, to continue experiencing them as you do presently.

Perhaps this is why people in their 30s and up have such trouble staying casual and care-free when they date. They know well the "isolated, distinct" pleasure that might await them, farther down the path -- even when they are just sitting down for a drink with someone for the first time. Their resulting expectations, largely mocked by our culture as excessively romantic, are in fact, as Proust teaches us, perfectly reasonable, even inevitable.

So Proust explains us to ourselves -- all of us... I hate to say older, let's say experienced... lovers. And it comes as a relief, I think, does it not? He shows us that, married or unmarried, we are full of expectations, appraisals, often anticipating what lies ahead. We can't help it.

Those years leading up to sweet sixteen are long gone. No more first, dizzying "French" kisses (do the French members of our group even know what this means?). No more furtive touches during seemingly endless games of Truth or Dare. No more losing all sense of time and space in a slow dance. There is no going back.

Yet -- sweet consolation! -- there is going forward. There is the pleasure of comparing our dog-eared maps of desire, gazing at markers along the way, exploring the winding paths, some old, some never before noticed... This, the pleasure of older lovers (and by that I mean anyone who has ever loved before) is surely a pleasure all of its own. Wouldn't you say so?

*

In "Swann in Love," the Narrator describes the different ways that a young lover and an older lover tend to fall for their beloveds, and I think it sheds further light on this subject.

He writes that, for someone like Swann, the mere experience of mutual sympathy with Odette is enough:

"But at the time of his life, tinged already with disenchantment, which Swann was now approaching, where a man can content himself with being in love for the pleasure of the loving without expecting too much in return, this mutual sympathy, if it is no longer as in early youth the goal towards which love inevitably tends, is nevertheless bound to it by so strong an association of ideas that it may well become the cause of love if it manifests itself first. In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of a woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her...

"Since we know its song, which is engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need for a woman to repeat the opening strains -- filled with the admiration which beauty inspires -- for us to remember what follows. And if she begins in the middle -- where hearts are joined and where it sings of our existing, henceforward, for one another only -- we are well enough attuned to that music to be able to take it up and follow our partner without hesitation at the appropriate passage" (SW, 277)

A question for the members of our reading group:

Do you agree with Proust here that older lovers are actually more susceptible than young lovers to falling in love, since they can skip right past the preliminaries? Put another way, have we become such saps -- so "disenchanted," to use Proust's Narrator's word -- that all we need is a little hit of mutual sympathy to fall madly in love?

I'm not convinced. If they were friends of mine, and I were a witness to this affair, I would suspect that there is something in Odette that draws Swann to her, beyond her ability to convince him that he possesses her exclusively. My experience tells me that there is a kind of magic, perhaps based in neurochemistry, complimentary immune systems, smells, facial patterns, background understandings, who knows, but a magic all the same, which makes him fixate on her in the first place.

Proust does not speculate about such a magic (although he does note its presence when discussing Swann's later attachment to Odettem, see SW, 438). On the contrary, Proust suggests that, initially at least, Odette's qualities are actually quite off-putting to Swann, and that Swann needs to supplement his thoughts of her by other means. He relies on his imagination, the instability of memory, and other cognitive tricks to help him sustain his passion for her, according to the Narrator. One useful way that he employs is to meditate on her passing resemblance to a beautiful figure in a painting by Botticelli:

"He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in her face and her body, and these he tried incessantly to recapture thereafter, both when he was with Odette and when he was only thinking of her in her absence... The words "Florentine painting" were invaluable to Swann. They enabled him, like a title, to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form" (ML, 316-317).

Zipporah, Jethro's daughter, in a detail from Botticelli's The Trials of Moses

But isn't it likely that Swann's transformation of Odette into a beauty in a Botticelli painting is only achieved because of some uncanny, pre-cognitive pull he has towards her? You can't just do that with anyone. If we could fall in love merely on account of mutual sympathy, then surely love affairs would happen frequently, confusingly, between friends. But there is that mystery, that extra element. And, whatever the Narrator tells himself, Odette has it, and M. Swann desires it.

12/05/2011

A challenge for our group, before our last meeting on the "Combray" chapter:

Take ten minutes -- time yourself -- and free associate your Proustian memories from childhood. (Don't worry if what comes up doesn't involve hawthorns and apple-trees. Just write down your sensual memories as they occur to you.)

Ready? Here are mine...

Berkeley in the early 70s

The dark smell of the redwood hot tub, mixed with chlorine.

The shaggy Bolivan rug my parents had in the living room.

Dust falling through the pillars of sunlight that came through the French doors.

The iron frog by the fireplace, filled with kerosene for lighting the fire.

My plastic Evil Knievel man on a motorcycle, and the peeling, folding vinyl ramp that I used to make him jump.

The smell of tortillas being made by Dad in the morning.

The long fur of my fat orange cat named Sam.

National Geographic magazines stacked on the shelf.

The purple and black knit blanket that hung on the couch.

My bunny suit body-length pajamas with the cold plastic feet bottoms.

The synthetic green oval rug in my room.

Looking out on the houses above ours, the one with the long balcony, the pink box at the top of the hill.

The teenage neighborhood kids on the street; one yelling, "SHUT UP!" and me imagining doors shutting.

My rubber band collection, useless and highly valued.

The metal inset at the back of my closet -- a secret door to another world?

The plastic jewels embeded in the tiles in our bathroom wall.

The spinning copper unit in the wall by the sink, that held the toothbrushes.

Walking home from Cragmont School on Spruce and jumping the low hedge like a hurdle.

The red berries that you can grab and throw.

The taste of American cheese on sandwiches.

My silver BMX bike, with the black handle-bars.

The smell of the cafeteria at Cragmont, the boxes of cereal.

Climbing on the roof and throwing apples.

The violets by the side of the house.

The secret tunnel through the hedge between my garden and our neighbor's.

12/08/2011

Last night we had another warm gathering and a rewarding discussion. What follows is my recollection of some of the things we talked about.

As always, please feel free to correct any misinterpretations, distortions or omissions in the comments section at the end!

Okay, here goes:

1. Yann’s “Moment of Being” in the Bath

Yann opened the evening with his presentation. As always with Yann (he’s an old friend, so I can say this), it was very strange, deeply felt, and somehow just what we needed.

“I am floating in the bath… naked,” he intoned in his deep voice, silencing the room.

“The water is warm. I feel free and light. I float. Then… I pull the plug.”

With this last phrase he made a sudden gesture with his thumb and index finger, roughly halfway between his waist and his knees, which had me worried, for a moment, about where exactly he was going with this. But I soon realized that he was merely showing us how he "pulled the plug". Perhaps the picture I had in my mind was too vivid? Perhaps I have been skinny dipping with Yann a few too many times?

Anyway, he continued: “The water disappears down the drain. Counter-clockwise... clockwise... whichever way it goes…” (Incidentally, Miriam was right on this – apparently the Coriolis Effect does determine the rotation and direction of weather patterns in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, but has little bearing on something as minute as the flow of water down a drain. So the whole the-water-flows-in-a-different-direction-down-toilets-in-Australia idea is a total crock. Go Miriam!).

But I keep getting distracted. Back to Yann.

“I feel myself growing heavier,” he said.

“The effect of gravity takes hold of me. The water is all gone now. My body presses down on the bathtub. I notice my body's weight. More than that, I feel its weight. So I lay there for an extra 20 more minutes, my body wet and glistening in the candlelight, even after the water had all drained away.”

Okay, I added the "wet and glistening in the candlelight" part, just to see if you were paying attention. But that was basically it.

Other than managing to inject a healthy amount of erotic tension into a room full of half-strangers, Yann's intention, which he then helpfully spelled out for us, was to illustrate how reading Proust has changed him. He would never have paid such close attention to the details of his bath if it were not for reading Proust. Proust was to blame for his wife thinking he was losing it when she came in to brush her teeth.

Miriam chimed in and said that she agreed: that at the core of this novel is a description of phenomenological experience, that is, those subjective experiences that we have by way of our senses (though, as Proust would surely emphasize, what we do with these sensory experiences is something else altogether). The physical facts of the world matter.

Heather linked Proust’s approach of paying close attention to details to the practice of “mindfulness”. I brought up the heavily romanticized accounts we read in the literature about the various Native American tribes, and their customs of paying close attention to detail and present-orientation (say in animal tracking). In this context I recalled a lecture I heard once on the subject of what we can learn from the Indians about becoming a true “native”. The speaker suggested that if you are without an awareness of the plants and water sources and wildlife around your home, you can hardly call yourself a “native” at all. Certainly, on this accounting, the Narrator in In Search of Lost Time is unquestionably a native of Combray, given his detailed knowledge of the paths from his Aunt Léonie's house alone. Yann mentioned that, partly inspired by Proust, he has recently formed a group to explore the geology and local history of the Bay Area, his adopted home.

Another theme that came up based on Yann's presentation was that although we are all bound by the laws of physics (gravity, the Coriolis Effect (go Miriam!), the loss of heat to skin while sitting in a bathtub without water, etc.), each of us has experiences which nevertheless feel intensely personal all the same. Thnking of this, I referenced a passage from "Swann in Love" in which Swann, having recently fallen for Odette, suddenly experiences a pang of fear for what is to come:

"... noticing as he drove home that the moon had now changed its position relatively to his own and was almost touching the horizon, feeling that his love, too, was obedient to those immutable natural laws, he asked himself whether this period upon which he had entered would last much longer, whether presently his mind's eye would cease to behold that beloved face save as occupying a distant and diminished position, and on the verge of ceasing to shed on him the radiance of its charm" (SW, 338).

Love is obedient to these immutable laws, and yet experienced moment by moment as a living, breathing thing. We are ourselves phenomena, and yet we experience phenomena, as Yann did in the bath. This is a strange paradox, which lies at the heart of Proust's concerns.

2. Is Heightened Sensual Awareness of This Sort Only Possible During Childhood?

I asked the group at this point, however, whether there isn’t another element to Proust’s rapturous descriptions of the young Narrator's sensual awareness: namely, that it belongs only to a certain period in life, childhood.

The Méséglise and Guermantes Ways, for all of their pleasures, seem to lead only one way for Proust: out of Eden. We gather that, somehow as he grew older the Narrator found himself banished from paradise, in some respects at least. Renée brought our attention here to the way Proust insists that only those experiences he had as a child remain vivid to him as a grown man:

“It is because I believed in things and people while I walked along those paths that the things and the people they made known to me are the only ones that I still take seriously and that bring me joy. Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers” (SW, 260).

Jennifer spoke up to say that of course there is something lost, but there is something gained too. We lose some of the limitless ecstasy of a child, but we gain more understanding, and certainly more stability. She pointed out that, in our later years, we may not have the same excitement about receiving a goodnight kiss from our mother, but neither do you have the terrible anguish and fear for its refusal. Sylvaine pointed out that a child sees clearly, but only with a kind of narrow tunnel vision (I might add, have you ever seen a child hunting for plainly hidden Easter eggs? If you have then you know it's hilarious. They see every blade of grass but not the egg two feet away!). As adults, we get more of the broader context.

Tom remarked that this is characteristic of Proust: every experience he describes is “layered”, encountered at different phases of life, enriched by memory and by flights of the imagination, altered by time and exposure to other experiences. As we read, he added, we experience the “liminal” spaces between these layers.

So, for example, we get first a straightforward childhood encounter with Gilberte – a freckled, reddish-haired girl passes the Narrator one day on a path near Swann’s estate. But then we also get its recreation in the Narrator’s memory: her enigmatic smile as she passed, her black eyes reimagined as azure (SW, 198). And then we get the Narrator’s parents' disinterest in this girl too; later we shall meet her again, in Paris, in a park on the Champs d'Elysees. Of all of these iterations, none has primacy; they are reflections of an unreachable, unified truth that is never to be grasped and may not even exist.

With that, Tom and Chandra and their baby exited, citing cat dander and the lateness of the hour, leaving us to mull over his great observation unaided by further explanation until January. We missed you T & C! (Seriously, we did keep referring back to your comment about layers all night.)

3. Making It Personal: Proustian Memories, Lightening Round

I asked at this point if there was anybody in the group who had taken a moment to think back on his or her childhood and recall the sensual experiences of that time, and if he or she wanted to share it with the rest of us. I mentioned for myself the distinct smell of the redwood hot tub, built by my father (as I believe was mandated for every backyard in Berkeley in the 70s), and how that aroma, mixed with the chlorine, conjured so much for me: my friendship with my sister, the blinking lights of planes passing overhead in the night sky, the feeling of grabbing a towel and heading into the living room from the cold air, that day a friend and I sprayed a hose, from our position in the hot tub, at our attractive house-sitter (my parents were away) as she sunbathed topless and facedown in the hopes that she would suddenly spring up... I could go on but I'll refrain. Dirk mentioned his grandmother's basement, and the smells of antiquated furniture, dried tomatoes, jams and jellies. Interestingly, he pointed out that he had only explored this basement when he was alone, with nothing else to do. (Thank god there were no iPhones and Wiis back then.) Jennifer mentioned the rank, sweet-smelling smell of pollution in Rome, and how it feels her with joy to this day whenever she happens to catch a whiff of it. Todd talked about his dog's soft and velvety paws.

This part of the evening, which involved personal recollections, brought out an interesting conversation at the end of the night. Some French members of our group insisted to me and Renée separately that in France a reading group is not likely to get so personal, ever. Rather there would be a kind of academic formality to the discussions. The American expectation, of course, is that we will always find a way to make it personal. Lea, who is half French and half Finnish, said that she appreciates this cultural difference, and she likes the willingness to reveal emotions and our own quirky responses. Marie-José suggested that French people are simply taught how to conduct textual analysis better (I tried not to get too huffy and bit my lip, even though I was still embarrassed about how painful it had appeared to be for her, a few minutes earlier, when she corrected my pronunciation of "Guermantes"). Florence wondered why, even if she was so inclined, we would ever want to hear anything personal: what would be the point? The Americans in the conversation all insisted that we consider it crucial, in a setting such as this, to make it personal; how else will we figure out what this novel is about if not based on what it does to us? I guess we are pragmatic about such things -- but here we get into cultural cross-currents again, beyond the scope of this summary.

4. Is Pure Sensuality Not Enough?

The next line of discussion that I recall is whether Proust, or at least his Narrator, is criticizing, either implicitly or explicitly, the purely sensual life, the life of the aesthete, if you will, in the Combray chapter.

It is in the section on the Guermantes Way that Proust's Narrator first introduces the theme of his own ambition to be a writer. For he discovers, while out searching for Gilberte one day, that the ecstasy of direct experience is short-lived:

"... all must bear the blows of my walking-stick or umbrella, must hear my shouts of happiness, these being no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which had not achieved the repose of enlightment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift towards an immediate outlet rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation..." (SW, 218)

He writes that on one occasion, seeing the "dappled pink reflection" that the tiled roof of a gardener's shed cast upon the pond, he cried aloud, brandishing his furled umbrella: "Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!"

"But at the same time," he adds,

"I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavor to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture" (SW, 219).

He determines that to "see more clearly" into the sources of his rapture he must write. At first he hopes his father can make him "the foremost writer of the day" simply by ordering it to be so (SW, 244). But he finds that the more he dreams, the more he begins to doubt himself. And finally, he despairs:

"It seemed to me then that I existed in the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old, that I must die like them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one of those who have no aptitude in writing. And so, utterly despondent, I renouced literature for ever... This intimate, spontaneous feeling, this sense of the nullity of my intellect, prevailed against all the flattering words that might be lavished upon me..." (SW, 244)

I got all worked up at this point, saying that I resented this judgment that Proust -- broad-minded, big-hearted Proust! -- seemed to be showing against any or all people who may choose more modest, more "intimate, spontaneous" lives than that to which he aspired. Marie-José reminded us that it is not Proust, it is only his fictional creation. To which I agreed, of course, but that doesn't blunt the attack. My interest was with the view, expressed by the Narrator, that we cannot be saved by the ecstatic awareness that Yann and Heather and all of us were praising at the beginning of the evening. We would feel worthless even if we achieved such a state of satori. We are all too full of judgments and prejudices and status claims.

I posed a thought experiment for the group: Imagine, I said, that you are traveling in Bali, and you meet a gentle, conscientious, charming French man who carries himself with astonishing equanimity. He is full of love. A great listener. He does not have an overly bronzed, hairless chest, suggesting something creepy. He is easy on the eye but unremarkable. He is not trying to seduce you, either; his girlfriend visits him from France every few months, and he is faithful.

The catch? You learn that for 10 years he has done nothing but travel and observe the incidents of daily life -- oh... and engage with people, like you, whom he meets along the way. He does not write down his experiences. He does not take photographs. He doesn't even organize spontaneous yoga classes on the beach at dawn. Is is life less worthy, according to you? According to Proust? I am sensing that it is suspicious, to all of us. This involves a form of judgment, and I'm not sure where it is heading to as we move through In Search of Lost Time. We just got a glimpse of it towards the end of the Combray chapter.

Heather spoke up to say that this guy in Bali would clearly need to get a life and do something. Again, of course -- everything in our culture condemns the man's sunny Balinese drift. But why exactly do we condemn him? That's my question. Is it because he is morally failing? Or is it that we pity him? Or is it that we sense -- perhaps this is Proust's point after all -- that his experiences of pleasure, for all of their beauty and directness and even mindfulness, lack something different that we also value. What is this other thing? A different pleasure, gained by hard work, by practice? Is it art? Is it making some kind of a contribution to others -- or as the cliché goes, largely empty of content and hence irritating to my ear, is it devoting yourself to "something larger than yourself"? Can we name it?

5. Listening to the "Little Phrase" from Vinteuil's Sonata for Piano and Violin

12/15/2011

I happened to read a review in The Nation yesterday, about a newly published novel, Mrs. Nixon, by the fiction writer Ann Beattie.

In it, I stumbled upon the following sentence:

"Am I a Beattie character?, you can’t help asking yourself. Is my life also not the seven-volume Proustian saga that I always thought it was? How long would it take her to dispose of me? Fifteen pages? Seven? Four? For many years, the copyright on Beattie’s books read not 'Ann Beattie' but 'Irony and Pity, Inc.'—the perfect, pithy summary of what she gives us, what we need."

It provoked me to ask the group...

So... are we living Proustian seven-volume sagas or Beattiesque, atomized existences? Can you, if you try, achieve the narrative sweep for your own life that Proust's Narrator achieves for his? Would you even want to, if you could?

Let's look a little more closely at the terms of this question. The reviewer, William Deresiewicz, describes Beattie's characters as:

"People yearning to escape, then yearning to escape their escape. People who needed to feel unique and ended up making themselves completely typical. People who couldn't grasp what was happening to them, even though they were the ones who were doing it."

Discussing the atmosphere of her stories from the 1970s, he comments:

"The sense was of an absent maker, characters abandoned to themselves... They were people who were going through their lives a moment at a time, trying to get to the next sentence... Not everybody's life was a novel, it turned out. Sometimes, there just wasn't that much to say about you."

This quality of abandonment and emptiness he holds up in opposition to Proust's life, as evidenced by his seven-volume semi-autobiographical novel.

It strikes me, however, that Deresiewicz has Proust wrong here, and that this opposition with Beattie is a false one.

For the characters that we have encountered in the first volume of In Search of Lost Time are not living larger lives, lives than demand a seven-volume novelization. Cottard's, or Swann's, or M Vinteuil's, or even Proust's Narrator's lives are full of quotidian detail. They lack fixity, even in their own minds, about who they are and what matters to them. They are, in Deresiewicz's terms, Beattiesque just as much as the life of a contemporary absentee parent or self-involved stoner or would-be hippie from one of Ann Beattie's early New Yorker stories.

The sense of meaning, the sense of having "much to say" about the lives in Proust's novel, I think comes from the emphasis Proust places on the role of the imagination (and its centrality). The characters in Beattie's fiction lack the imagination to place themselves in a narrative, but this surely does not mean that a narrative is impossible. And, likewise, if you successfully create a narrative for a character, as Proust does for his Narrator, this does not indicate that this life has more meaning than any other life.

As Beattie and Proust both recognize, there is perhaps nothing intrinsically meaningful, not "much to say" about any life, taken on its brute facts. The difference is that Proust offers an escape route for his Narrator (and for all of us) by the value he places on an individual's imagination, the telling of the story itself, while Beattie rarely gives this recourse to her characters.

It may be true that it is difficult to tell a coherent story for ourselves. But we are all, every one of us, I would suggest, leading Proustian lives.

01/03/2012

For anyone who has ever been betrayed by a kindly acquaintance or even a supposed friend, Swan’s rumination after receiving that “anonymous letter” with the poisonous assertions about Odette is instructive. He asks himself:

“What criterion ought one to adopt to judge one’s fellows? After all, there was not a single person he knew who might not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of a shameful action. Must he then cease to see them all?” (SW, 509)

Have we not all experienced this desire to exclude, to cease to see somebody or some group of people, after we have been wounded? Have we not wanted to say, I will have nothing to do with these kind of people ever again!

We talk of how long it takes to get over a slight or a betrayal or a wound. We are inclined to lecture ourselves and others on the importance of forgiveness. But really, how does one “get over it” and continue to move in the company of the suspect or the culprit?

Swan struggles for us. His mind clouds, he wipes his brow, he cleans his glasses and then remembers that he knows of men whom he considers as good as himself (even if they conceivably could be capable of infamy), men who nevertheless frequent the company of his list of suspects. He reasons then, that it must be a "necessity" in human life to frequent the society of people who are perhaps not incapable of such actions.

And with that matter settled, we are told, Swan continues to shake hands with all of the friends whom he had suspected, yet now with the “purely formal reservation that each one of them had possibly sought to drive him to despair” (SW, 510).

Is this the answer then? Must we necessarily resume our friendships? And does this necessity for resuming our social relations then require a new, “formal reservation” when frequenting company?

What exactly does Proust mean by this “formal reservation”? Does he mean that Swann is to be guarded and suspicious, or simply detached? Does a formal reservation mean that we engage with our friends whom we suspect, but give up on trusting them?

01/05/2012

These notes cover Volume One, Swann's Way, to the end of "Swann in Love."

A spirited night. A provocative discussion.

As one member of our group memorably characterized it on her way out the door: "That was spicy!"

The "Swann in Love" chapter elicited a wide variety of responses, as well as some interesting disagreements.

So here we go. I'll do my best to recall the flow of the conversation. As always, please offer any improvements or additions in the comments section below!

1. Léa's "French" Presentation

Léa justified not having read all the way to the end of Swann in Love by insisting that a "French" presentation classically requires two things: 1) knowing very little about the subject upon which you speak, and 2) saying nothing of substance -- but saying it with complete confidence.

After that funny introduction, she then proceeded to play us a CD that she had brought, which contained an excerpt from Swann in Love read by a famous French actor (I have forgotten his name... will someone please add it to the comments below?).

Léa pushed play, and this actor's low, soothing, well-trained voice (no dentalized "t"s! no whistling "s"s!) poured over us like... a rich crème brulee. (Perhaps this is not quite the right image? It was actually very pleasurable.) He read from Proust's description of the first meeting between Odette and Swann.

After about five minutes Léa brought the volume down. Renée disappeared upstairs to explain those rumbling bass tones to our children. And the discussion began in earnest.

Some members of the group commented on how "romantic," even seductive, Proust sounded when read aloud by a professional. Yann observed that those long Proustian sentences, which often frustrate him as he reads, were surprisingly easy to follow in this actor's slow and rhythmic reading.

Léa mentioned that her experience as a reader of In Search of Lost Time makes her feel like a passenger on a train: the car rattles forward for some time, then lurches backwards, then starts forward again. At many points on the trip, as she gazes out the window at the passing scenery, she has no idea where she is going. Nor does she have a picture in her mind of the station that awaits her at the end of the line. Halfway through the Combray chapter, though, Léa said she learned simply to put her faith in the engineer (imagine M. Proust in a blue-and-white striped cap!). She stopped trying to anticipate, and this helped her enjoy herself more.

So Léa urged us to trust the engineer and the tracks. Being a Californian, I urged Yann to try "surfing" the sentences, to think of them as waves, and not to get hung up in the intricacies of their grammar. Marie-José countered, quite rightly however, that the reader of Proust also needs to consider carefully each phrase, each punctuation mark, "to the letter".

I'm afraid our collective advice to Yann may not have been very helpful; it seems each reader needs to find his or her own way. I have no doubt that Yann, with his usual determination, will find his very own Proustian groove in the end.

2. The Question of Swann

From these more technical considerations -- how to approach Proust's sentences, the rhythm of the language -- we moved abruptly on to a more blunt question: What is M. Swann's problem anyway?

Heather was the one who led us there. First she noted that her concerns about the affectation of some of Proust's prose (which, you will recall, she had detected in the Narrator's attachment to his "beloved hawthorns" in the Combray chapter) had returned with a vengeance as she read Swann in Love. To Heather, Swann's anguish, his doubts, his behavior, convey a quality of "preciousness". She characterized this middle-aged man as a privileged "narcissist", living a "purposeless" life.

Renée, back from having tucked the kids in one last time, took issue with the description of Swann as a narcissist. She suggested, to the contrary, that he is merely "lost" or better yet, "stuck". His essay on Vermeer gathers dust; he is tired of the repetitious gatherings and endless status-mongering of his wealthy friends; he is seeking something new and true. (Heather, to her great credit, retracted the term "narcissist" at this point, agreeing that such a term should not be applied too broadly. Self-interested, then?)

Renée elaborated a little more on her very different view of Swann's predicament. To her, Swann's experience of falling for Odette was merely incidental to his prior encounter with art. In Renée's reading, it is of critical importance that Swann encountered that "little phrase" of Vinteuil's, which struck him as "random, fragile, melancholy, incessant, sweet" (SW, 296), before he ever met Odette. He is described as having felt immediately, upon hearing it, "the possibility of a sort of rejuvination" (SW, 296). He becomes obsessed with hearing it again, but cannot find it. So when he hears it a year later at Mme Verdurin's salon, in the company of Odette, a transference occurs, Renée thinks, wherein Swann's aspiration towards a "wholly different life" (contained, mystically for him, in this musical phrase) attaches in his mind to the person of Odette.

Thus Swann, an idle aristocrat no doubt, but an unusually intelligent and sensitive one, finds through Odette a connection to something universal. This is the artist's perspective on Swann's obsession -- that it represents a step towards the light, something almost divine. It is counter to the political perspective on Swann, that he is accustomed to exploiting others by way of his wealth and status, and Odette represents merely another object to make his own.

I spoke up here to say that I agreed with Renée's insight of how significant it is that the "little phrase" came first, and that Swann struck me too as more lost or stuck, rather than someone who is irredeemably selfish and poisoned by privilege. Yet I don't think it ends there, I added. In my reading of this love affair, once Swann attaches his dreams to Odette (I think of Yeats here: "Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"), however well-intentioned, he takes a wrong turn.

My sense as I read this chapter was that this opening up that Swann initially experiences -- what Proust calls his "sort of rejuvination" -- quickly closes down when he tries to possess Odette. He follows the fatal impulse to hold time still, to own another person's heart, and this drains out of him the oceanic feeling that first drew him to Odette.

But let's go directly to Proust and see how he sees it. Here is Swann madly trying to track down the "little phrase" (a year before he even meets Odette):

"But now, like a confirmed invalid in whom, all of a sudden, a change of air and surroundings, or a new course of treatment, or sometimes an organic change in himself, spontaneous and unaccountable, seems to have brought about such an improvement in this health that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all hope, of starting to lead belatedly a wholly different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the phrase that he had heard, in certain other sonatas which he had made people play to him to see whether he might not perhaps discover his phrase therein, the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe and to which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of re-creative influence, he was conscious once again of the desire and almost the strength to consecrate his life" (SW, 290).

He feels the presence of an "invisible reality" to which he may find "the strength to consecrate his life". This sounds promising. Then, a year later, he hears this same music, played on the piano at the Verdurins...

"[N]ow, at last, he could ask the name of his fair unknown (and was told that it was the andante of Vinteuil's sonata for piano and violin); he held it safe, could have it again to himself, at home, as often as he wished, could study its language and acquire its secret" (SW, 299).

Here we are starting to hear the language of possession: to "have it again to himself, at home, as often as he wished..." sounds downright sordid. You want to look away.

Odette, who has made him feel special, who (like the musical phrase) has so often left a smile on his lips after their meetings, becomes more and more someone whom he wants to have again to himself, at home, as often as he wished. Over time, even Vinteuil's sonata takes on a different quality for Swann, not one of liberation but of ritualistic, almost mechanistic identification:

"... the pianist would play to them -- for their two selves -- the little phrase by Vinteuil which was, so to speak, the national anthem of their love... but Swann thought he could now discern in it some disenchantment. It seemed to be aware how vain, how hollow was the happiness to which it showed the way. In its airy grace there was the sense of something over and done with" (SW, 308).

Now the music and the intimations of love are slipping away, and this development only makes him want to grip both of them more tightly:

"[Now] he contemplated the little phrase less in its own light... than as a pledge, a token of his love, which made even the Verdurins and their young pianist think of Odette at the same time as himself -- which bound her to him by a lasting tie" (SW, 309).

Swann, owning so many material things, wants to own this feeling of opening to the world, like a jewel which a thief might pocket. Not recognizing its "airy grace" for its essential quality, he wants to make his awakening a tangible possession.

3. The Politics Beneath It All

Despite her retraction of the charge of narcissism against Swann, Heather's other condemnations of him still lingered with us. Privileged... Self-interested... A "purposeless life".

A similar tone of disgust crept into Yann and Dirk's following remarks about their general lack of interest in the chapter. Yann said he wondered as he read whether Proust shared his derision at these wealthy, superficial, silly characters, the whole lot of them. He finds himself put off, above all, by their immaturity. When at one point I mentioned with a laugh that perhaps, back in college, we all experienced that sense of triumph after a break up that Swann expresses with the last line of the chapter ("To think that I've wasted years of my life [and she] wasn't even my type!" SW, 543), Yann exclaimed, "Yeah, we all experienced that, and then we turned 19!"

In his view Swann is so far beneath him as not to merit interest. Dirk echoed this, expressing his disappointment over the falling off he felt from the Combray chapter's descriptive beauty -- the sun reflecting off the lake, the white hats like porcelain, etc. To him Swann just needed to "get a job!" Dirk confessed that as he read he felt like writing "WTF" over and over again in the margins, so great was his boredom and dismay.

Wow. I was stunned. My question, addressed to Yann and Dirk: Is it the social milieu of the novel that troubles you so much, or something else? Of course Swann is an aristocrat, living in turn of the century Paris. Of course, as Karl Marx noted in reflecting on the "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!" cry of the French Revolution, certain values are reserved for those who already have their basic needs met. (I would add to the French Republic's tripartite motto, which Marx ascribed to the bourgeosie, the motto of an artistically-inclined aristocrat like Swann: "Aesthetic Detail! Ecstatic Experience! Courtesy!") Resources, however unjustly distributed, provide access to a certain set of values.

Yet these values are accessible, I would argue, to any human being under certain circumstances. In this sense they are universal. Sure, they may be superfluous for many, but they are a part of the human experience, and I believe that they are worthy of reflection.

I came back hard at Yann in particular. Look, I argued, you sound as if you should be writing for Pravda, back in Stalinist Russia in the 1940s. You will go far, comrade! Reviewers back then, party hacks, routinely condemned anything that smacked of aristocratic languor, effete concerns for truth or beauty. Soviet artists should represent the simple, compelling concerns of working men and women: bread, duty, labor. They should prioritize real-world events over the filigreed concerns of the capitalist elite.

If you want art that examines the political and economic substructures of our lives, there are many brilliant options. I think immediately of Bertolt Brecht, for example. Or Goya. One of my favorite contemporary writers is George Saunders. But to dismiss Proust's characters wholesale because they are products of this aristocratic culture -- or to insist that Swann simply needs to "get a job!" -- that seems defensive, or at the very least close-minded, to me.

Yann said it wasn't the social milieu that was the problem. It was the fact that Swann, and Proust's Narrator for that matter, are so caught up in their own thoughts and unstable emotions, that it strikes him as la vie mondiane (do I have that right?), a product of gossipy high society, and a big bore. "What do you want," I asked, growing red in the face, "More action? You should go read a spy thriller!" (Yann, I get worked up. Forgive me my enthusiasms.)

4. Taking Sides Between Swann and Odette

This debate over the intrinsic superficiality of Swann and his set tied to another topic of discussion as well. We all agreed that as readers it is not useful for us to sit in judgment of the characters. As Nabokov so often pointed out to his American readers, there is no need to personally inset yourself into a novel; it exists as a world of its own, a fictional creation in which you are free to explore without judgment. Readers looking for heroes or heroines or, worst of all, "sincerity" drove him crazy.

Sure, Nabokov. Okay. We got you.

Nonetheless, the story of Swann and Odette (not unlike contemporary romantic comedies -- 27 Dressesanyone?) invites taking sides. It is structured somewhat like a match of wits. On one side you have the attractive courtesan, who has been sexually exploited by various men since was a very young girl, who is no doubt suffering from deep trauma (as Heather pointed out), in desperate need of financial resources, at a lowly station in life, a hardened survivor: Odette. On the other side you have the wealthy dilettante, the confirmed bachelor who collects art and drops witticisms at social gatherings, who is adrift and looking for meaning in his life: Swann. The chapter traces the arc of their meeting, their love affair, and its dissolution. Who's to blame? Who won? Who lost? These are unavoidable questions.

In fact, as I pointed out in the meeting, the final interrogation of Odette by Swann, in its brutality, its play-acting, its clash of world views, reminded me of the justly famous, extended interrogation in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Swann struck me as the member of the secret police, interrogating this parasite of society, this enemy of History with a capital "H", Odette. Yet you could reverse the analogy too. Odette embodies the hard-knuckled forces of power; Swann, the fading ideals of love, consigned to the dustbin. There are, as always in Proust, multiple perspectives available to us.

Heather clearly blamed Swann, this selfish, unthinking cad. She sympathized with Odette. Although I would never raise him up as a paragon of love, I expressed more sympathy for Swann, who after all is hoping that he and Odette share something special and unique between them (even if it is only on his terms), whereas she never even contemplates such a ludicrous notion. Marie-José insisted that Swann's station in life, his aristocratic social class, precluded him from considering marriage with Odette. I argued against this, reminding her that Proust explicitly writes about Swann's rejection of the snobbery of his friends. Jennifer pointed out that there is no doubt of the shame and snobbery directed at Proust and his lowly marriage, when we encounter it in the Combray chapter. To which I replied, yes, no doubt, but Swann pointedly does not share in such snobbery when we meet him with Odette at the Verdurins. His strongest animus is towards the Comte de Forcheville, who is after all an aristocrat like himself.

Odette, we might note, was "impressed by [Swann's] indiffernce to money, by his kindness to everyone, by his courtesy and tact" (SW, 342). Swann, according to Proust,

"had, indeed, one of the advantages which men who have lived and moved in society enjoy over those, however intelligent, who have not, namely that they no longer see it transfigured by the longing or repulsion which it inspires, but regard it as no importance. Their good nature, freed from all taint of snobbishness and from the fear of seeiming too friendly, grown independent, in fact, has the ease, the grace of movement of a trained gymnast" (SW, 285).

In the end though, Marie-José and I agreed that, even if not conclusive, Swann surely has a residue of class-consciousness which would make him resist the idea of marrying Odette despite his lack of open snobbery.

Pascale commented, near the end of the meeting, having absorbed the discussion, that she found herself thinking of Swann as one of those people who connect best to art, whether writing, painting, or music, but have a difficult time connecting to real people, flesh and blood human beings. It is true that Proust describes the way the Verdurins "very quickly sensed in [Swann] a locked door, a reserved, impenetrable chamber in which he still professed silently to himself..." But I argued that this is not because of an emotional reserve, a failure to connect to others in general. After all, Proust insists that Swann's behavior is more the result of his "resistance to complete conversion, the like of which they had never come across in anyone before" (SW, 354). M. Verdurin may condemn him as "never definitely fish nor fowl," but

"In reality there was not one of the 'faithful' [of the Verdurins' salon] who was not infinitely more malicious than Swann; but they all took the precaution of tempering their calumnies with obvious pleasantries, with little sparks of emotion and cordiality..." (SW, 377).

5. What Swann in Love is Doing in the Novel as a Whole

Dirk asked the group to comment on what we thought this chapter was doing in the novel. Jeff responded that perhaps it is intended ironically -- a kind of cautionary tale about love. We start with the innocence of Gilberte and her freckled face, and the childlike sense of wonder she evokes for Proust's Narrator. But then we get into middle-school, as it were: with all of the social ups and downs, the exclusivity, the cruelty, the lies, the queen bees and social climbers, that such a setting entails. A number of people in group, including Yann and Nathalie, wondered whether Swann in Love might be a stage along the way in a progression towards an understanding of a deeper love. I was skeptical of this view, simply because I do not recognize a huge gap between the familiar pretensions and masks and machinations of the characters in Swann in Love and adult society. I think we are too quick to push that away as "middle-school stuff". Heather commented on the cynicism of Proust towards his characters, but to me he is accurate, and his descriptions, although harsh, are so compelling that they open my heart towards the people I know in my own life, with all of their quirks and habits. (I have attended holiday parties with a more generous spirit this season, having spent so much in the company of Proust these last weeks.)

6. Last Comments

Feeling terrible for having gotten myself so worked up, having managed to insult my dear friend Yann by calling him a Soviet hack propagandist who should go read spy thrillers, having found myself in a face-off with the intrepid and formidable Marie-José over the question of Swann's snobbery, I came to my senses near the end of the meeting and inquired whether anyone who had not spoken would like to say something. Thank god, because their comments were deeply insightful.

Francoise commented that she had enjoyed Swann in Love very much. She was fascinated by the way that we change according to our social circumstances and the pressures on us. Swann starts in one mode -- as the decorous, generous-minded, tactful aristocrat, without snobbery, attending his friend Odette's literary salon on a whim. And soon he is a possessive, disheveled wreck of a man, paranoid, jealous, suspicious. Odette starts with a coquettish quality, warming Swann to his work, encouraging him, very much in command of herself, and then she grows cold and irritable, disdainful and suddenly lustful. The lack of fixity that Proust recognizes in all of us is frightening:

"For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity" (SW, 529).

Nathalie Valette spoke to the way it struck her that so much of Swann's experience stems from his mind, as if he has not integrated his thoughts into his body. On the phone today she also noted that his sense of being lost, being adrift, might come from his Jewish identity too. He can perhaps never be accepted fully in Parisian society. And to the extent that his family has converted to Christianity this represents a trauma of its own, a denial of his cultural heritage.

Finally, Rachel made the excellent observation that many of the descriptions and passages in Swann in Love are hilarious. Dr. Cottard's attempts at word-play; Mme Verdurin's throwing her jaw out of place by the forced suppression of her fake laughter; Swann's desperate, almost slapstick attempts to find out if Odette has a visitor on the night she does not answer to his knock; his peering at the letter through its envelope. So many of these events and characters are true to life and absurd all at once.

---

Well, we talked about much more of course, but I'll leave it there for now. Thank you all so much for coming, for engaging your minds and opening your hearts, for your willingness to grapple with this, all of us together. Spicy evenings are good. Harmonious evenings are good. Let us continue and have ever more exotically seasoned evenings as we read and meet.